


feed his flesh to wayward daughters

by reogulus



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Episode s02e09: DC, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 09:07:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20945831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reogulus/pseuds/reogulus
Summary: Her family’s company is hers, will be hers. Even from a whale fall, new life would spring.Spoilers through the events of 2.09. Title is from "Not in Kansas" by The National.





	feed his flesh to wayward daughters

**Author's Note:**

> There were a few scenes in 2.09 that just went over me like a bulldozer and Sarah Snook probably finally broke something in me so I had to write something entirely self-indulgent to patch myself back together. Heavy spoilers through 2.09 that might well be rendered canon non-compliant by the season finale.

They went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it with mud. 

WONG KAR WAI, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

I.

Kira called Nate right there at the playground, sitting on that bench next to Shiv. She put the call on speaker, apologizing and declining almost breathlessly. That smug edge in Nate’s voice was all but vanished, and Shiv could imagine the color draining from his cheeks along with it. She had to bite her lips to keep quiet; her fingers laced in her lap, the wedding band starting to feel too warm under the afternoon sun. Kira’s voice was almost going to break when Nate told her to “take care” before hanging up, but it held. _That’s how you can tell_, Shiv thought; the woman held it in for twenty odd years, and she got a few more years in her at least. Women like that were always stronger than they’d ever give themselves credit for.

Before Shiv bent to put her heels back on, her phone pinged with a new text from Karolina. She’d asked the head of PR to get Ratfucker Sam to dig deep on Kira before this meeting, as deep as he can get in two hours, and once again he didn’t disappoint. Karolina put in a neat bullet list the credit card debt, the overdraft, the retired mother’s dental bill and the pre-school kid’s field trip fees. Shiv pulled out her personal check book, copied from her phone the total amount. She put an extra flourish on the ‘y’ when she signed, held Kira’s hand to steady her when she handed over the check, smiled.

By the time Shiv left the playground, the car was waiting for her but Rhea was gone. She’d tried shaking them out and she couldn’t see them, but she could still feel tiny bits of sand in the toe caps.

II.

Tom whined to her about not wanting to come to the reception, waiting for Shiv to tell him he didn’t have to be there so he could shake his head and say he’d taken it all day, what’s a few more hours. All Shiv could do was to pull their security aside to ask him to keep a close eye on Greg and Tom, make sure that they don’t speak at this reception or anywhere else in the hotel, and make Tom go to the spa tonight with his phone put away for as long as possible. She peeked beyond the security guy’s broad shoulders to see that old Bill Lockhart was standing a few feet away, smiling too broad when they made eye contact. So she walked over.

His right hand was halfway lifted to a handshake offer but then she opened first: “How’s retirement treating you? I figured you’d be the one I should ask on how today compares to their regular programming.”

Bill laughed, slightly bent towards her like he was actually jolly about the whole thing. “Never a dull moment with the Waystar crew, oh no. It’s your day today, truly, even Connor is working the room like a DC heavyweight.”

“Our day,” Shiv chuckled and sipped her drink, suddenly hyperaware of the presence of the balls of her feet. Any other day in Washington she might have swapped for a pair of flats by this time of the day but today was the day to don a blazer dress instead of trousers in the morning, stand in the most well-constructed-for-comfort pair of designer shoes into the eleventh hour and smile like she meant it.

“Oh, yes, you and your family. But not your husband, certainly. Senator Eavis knew how to pick his battles, didn’t he? Smart guy. You would know from your days working here, you picked him after all.”

Bill was relentless in his positivity, there were stories about his firing employees through every reorg over the years that she’d hear about even in her political consulting days. She certainly wouldn’t doubt them now.

“Right, yeah, yeah I didn’t expect any less from dear old Gil,” she drained her glass. “You’re here to talk to dad, right? I’m just warming up the crowd for you.”

“You know, Siobhan, I really didn’t expect to stick around until now when I came in the morning. But you all cued my name so many times I felt properly summoned, like I was some kind of Beetlejuice demon. It would be rude not to say hello to Logan. You get it.”

She nodded along, tapped her foot silently against the carpeted floor, wondering how long she could keep up this farce of an opening act. Bill turned away to congratulate Kendall and took his first sip from the glass. Shiv smiled at Kendall, the same smile she’d given him since they were forced to entertain unwanted guests of their father's as third graders. But Naomi Pierce was right behind him so of course Kendall’s eyes were too glazed to even register the expression on her face.

Then the doors opened and the crowd went from murmur to buzz. Her father was making his way to the middle, parting the crowd as he did in any Waystar boardroom and ballroom like Moses himself.

“Speak of the devil,” Bill whispered before brushing past her to greet the headliner.

III.

“What do you really, truly want to see happen to your family’s company?”

Her latest therapist, maybe her last one ever, the woman with the cat-eyed glasses asked her. This was right after Shiv told her about the offer made at the summer palace. She’d already triple-checked with the shrink and with her professional association hotline to ensure that everything Shiv was about to say would be strictly confidential, and there’d be proper legal recourse if anything ever got out.

“I don’t know yet. I want it to be better,” Shiv crossed her legs. Waved her hand vaguely, “more ad revenue, maybe, improve some metrics or shit like that. It’s not hard to learn, though, anyone can learn if they teach that shit at corporate daycare. That’s not what scares me.”

“What scares you, then?”

Shiv looked past the therapist’s shoulder, the clock on her desk ticking down to the last two minutes of their session. Connor always complained about running out of time with everything he wanted to pour out on the shrink’s couch but she was always the one watching the clock. Time could slow to a crawl, collapsing inward if you got too close to yourself.

“Do you think my dad will let me be his pallbearer at the funeral? I mean, there’s just the four of us and Tom got this old shoulder injury from his college baseball days.”

IV.

Shiv was ready to leave the reception when her third call to Roman went straight to voicemail. She needed to gloat to someone who wasn’t here, to put in words and therefore flatten the feeling roused in her chest when Logan cradled her cheek and gave her a kiss, to temporarily pretend that the victory wasn’t temporary. She and Gerri had both pulled an armchair close to the back wall, to sit and scroll through their phones in peace; they both know that it’s best to stick to each other because when Logan came back from Rhea, he’d reach for one of them.

Logan never came back and Rhea never came in; Colin came when the crowd had thinned, his approaching steps always too quiet to hear. He turned to Gerri first with instructions from Logan, they will talk on a conference call with Karolina and Hugo at 7 in the morning. Gerri nodded, opening up the calendar app on her phone, her face hardened and blank behind those thick-framed glasses. How many more expresso shots and caffeine pills for the all-nighter? Shiv folded her fingers into her palm.

“Ms. Siobhan,” the muscle man turned to Shiv. “He would like to see you in his suite. Follow me please.”

“Uh-huh,” Shiv nodded, getting up from her seat to scan the room for Tom, she wanted to tell him not to wait up. But he wasn’t there.

V.

Ratfucker Sam’s two-hour research was ten pages long, Karolina sent her a copy read in the car after the playground meeting—on Slack, because they must be careful about emails now. As expected, nobody who worked for more than three years anywhere in Waystar could walk out clean.

The personal profile was straightforward, all her decades covered in three pages. Kira had started out as a simple girl who grew up on a farm in the Midwest, working class parents who put their only daughter through an expensive education in the performing arts. Married young but didn’t become a mother until she was a divorcee. Spent ten years working under Mo until she was his right-hand woman, in the most insidious and repulsive sense of the word, so it might be safe to say she would never marry again.

Sam hacked his claws into the prepared statement Gil was going to have Kira read on camera on a morning show, and annotated every accusation towards Mo or other executives with Kira’s acquiescence, her complicity every step of the way. She was a detail that wouldn’t have even made the fourth paragraph had the exposé come out from an investigative journalist. Nothing real. Barely a footnote.

For the next few days Shiv would have to keep the pressure on Kira like an open wound because there were other women, victims that Nate’s people were going to find one by one as soon as that phone call disconnected. Mo was her father’s friend, good friend, for a long, long time. Nate and Gil, Sandy and Stewy, too many sharks in the water and the share price probably dipped to a new low but she would never check a stock ticker. Her husband’s nerves fraying at the edges on national television. She had promised a woman she’d never met before that she would kill roughly one third of the top male executives of her family’s company. Her company.

The last look Rhea gave her before she shut the car door was concern close to fear—no longer the same woman who heard their pitch in the safe room, who laughed with her at Argestes. Rhea had only _looked_ into the abyss; she got cold feet and she didn’t even know what it’s like to grow up _in _it.

Her family’s company is hers, will be hers. Even from a whale fall, new life would spring.

VI.

Shiv kicked off her heels as soon as Colin closed the door behind her. ATN news was blasting at full volume and Logan poured her a drink as dark as the mood in the room.

“A blood sacrifice,” she repeated what Logan said in barely a whisper, remembering the cage match childrearing that marked her brothers’ childhoods. Send the weak one away—but this time it felt different. To plead for rain in drought season, to calm the sea in a storm, you must offer up the best and strongest. Perhaps, in a way, their dad has always saved one of them for a rainy day like this. The news anchor kept talking too fast and too shrill and Shiv finally felt the weight of the silence too heavy not to say something.

“My brother or my husband, right?” whenever Shiv got nervous, she laughed before attempting a joke.

It was a long beat before Logan replied—Shiv wasn’t sure if he didn’t listen or didn’t care. “Maybe…perhaps. Perhaps neither. If Ewan is Wiesel’s backer, I still have his grandson by the balls.”

“Uh-huh,” she nodded, making sure to take a sip of the drink smaller than his. With her free hand, she reached down to start massaging her heels and her toes. The day has gone on for long enough that her subconscious was forcing a reminder that she still had the rest of her body.

Logan turned his attention away from the TV. “Oh, Pinky…your feet must be tired. Get Colin to call a masseuse for you.”

She sprang from the couch, shaking her head vigorously: “No, I’m good, dad, just need a good soak before bed. It’s been a hell of a day for all of us, I mean, I wasn’t even in the chair.”

Logan raised his eyebrows at her and mumbled an “alright”, and it dawned on her too late what that must have sounded like. At this point she might well be the last woman in the world that Logan would even share a drink with, with Marcia keeping herself out of sight for what felt like weeks. Shiv couldn’t decide if she wanted to laugh it off or not, so she focused on measuring out her sips until Colin was summoned.

VI.

Roman was still ignoring calls by the time Shiv changed into her pajamas, so that probably meant the talks with Eduard were going well enough that they turned off their phones to share a whore together. Tom was already asleep with the bedside lamp on.

Shiv unlocked her phone, 5% battery on lowest screen brightness, scrolling down to Kendall’s name. She hadn’t texted him since she sent him the video of his rap with four cry-laughing emojis. She put her thumbs to the keyboard.

> _You up?_
> 
> _Gerri miscalculated, it’s not gonna be Bill, dad says it needs to be bigger, and_
> 
> _It might be Tom but I think it will be you_
> 
> _Tell me what happened it might not be too late_
> 
> _You don’t have to do…_

She pressed hard on the backspace key, almost like reflex, as soon as she heard Rhea’s voice echoing in her head.

What did kings do with secrets that kept them up at night, back when an empire like the Roys’ could not have been dreamed up yet? There was an old foreign film that lulled her to sleep in Nate’s arms on the first mattress she ever ordered for herself. She could picture her younger self like she was peering into the windows of a miniature diorama, her head could hurt and for nothing good. Nothing for her to change.

So she tossed her phone across the room onto the loveseat, and turned off the light.


End file.
